Terms

Indo-European Peoples

Indo-European Languages

Various groups of Indo-European peoples migrated out of Central Asia in the third millennium BC, pushed westwards and southwards by a combination of climate change, population movements, and perhaps pressure from other peoples further east. Their language broke down into dialects that can be divided into twelve branches, ten of which contain surviving languages. Very briefly, these are the Anatolians (the Hittites, Luwians, and Lydians), the Balts (such as the Latvians and Lithuanians on the eastern Baltic Sea coast), Celts (who once dominated Central and Western Europe), the Germanic peoples (who originate from Old Norse and Saxon peoples), the Greeks (most notably the Mycenaeans), the Illyrians (of the northern and eastern Adriatic coast, surviving in Albania), the Indians (the Aryan peoples), the Iranians (in the form of the Persians and Scythians), the Latins (embodied by the Romans), the Slavs (who came to dominate Eastern Europe after the fall of the Roman empire), the Thracians (of northern Greece and the Balkans which also includes Armenian), and finally the Tokharians (in north-west China, closely related to the Anatolian, Celtic, and Latin branches).